Tuesday 10 August 2010

Clogs, Cheese, Canals and Crispy Fried Duck...

19 August 2001. As we attempt to draw the Netherlands weekend to a close in one entry brought to you by the letter "C", we start off in a clog shop in Marken.

The tools of the trade are there but not the clogger himself as Marken is still acting a bit like a ghost town.

There are rows and rows of freshly caught clogs hung up waiting to be smoked in the time-honoured tradition... hang on... it's what? They don't have the shelf space? They are waiting to be painted?

Now at one time my dear old dad taught me how to apply shoe polish. Using a soft brush you dipped the bristles into the Kiwi tin and then using gentle circular motions of the hand, brushed the polish into the shoe leather.

You then took a slightly stiffer brush and vigorously scrubbed and buffed the shoe until the shine dazzled your eyes. Then you took a duster and repeated the buffing until you had to either draw the curtains or turn the lights off in order not to hurt your eyes. This occurred every single morning.

I'm ashamed to say that the last time I actually polished a pair of shoes that way was probably some time in the early 1970s... But hey! How easy do the Dutch have it?!? A coat of Dulux and an annual application of varnish and there you are! Permanently sparkly shoes and with an image of your choice!

Well, to be fair windmills featured quite a lot... The only downside would be the clatter as you walked down the street and not being able to visit mill towns in the north and villages in the south of England in the summer without being given some bells, a stick or a hanky and being dragged into some loony dance where fearsome men with antlers strapped to their heads attempt to poke your eye out or knock your hat off with the stick or dust the fluff from your ears with their hanky!

Even the coach driver was getting spooked at there being so few people about - we left Marken and headed for Volendam, stopping on the way at another clog factory where someone demonstrated chopping logs into footwear and I got engrossed with a cheesemaid...

This could have been scary - I still hadn't forgotten the dancers stabbing Barbara Parkins with pitchforks in Alistair MacLean's Puppet on a Chain - but I made her put her pitchfork down...

And so, on to Volendam, across a causeway with the sea on both sides of the road. Volendam is another of the places where traditional dress is worn by the locals - just not when we were there...

It was picturesque, it had lots of tourists, lots of shops and a tiny, tiny corner of beach.

Our guide Chris, found a suitable bit of headgear and as we drove back out of Volendam for a meal in Amsterdam she got Peter, the driver to wear it. The looks on people's faces as we drove past them were priceless...

We ate on the floating Sea Palace Chinese Restaurant in Amsterdam and an excellent meal it was too. This floating eatery boasts 800 seats but we were told that unfortunately on the day it opened to a full house, it started to sink as it had been designed to cope with the average weight of Chinese people not tubby westerners... Whether this is true or not I'm not sure because I couldn't find anything about it with a quick search through Google! But a good story none-the-less!

From the restaurant we went onto barges for a tour of the canals at night. There were a couple of snags. One: it started to rain heavily. Two: it wasn't yet night. The idea had been to view the canals whilst they were all lit up with electric lights along their length, but the firm had double booked and we had to go whilst it was still light...

However, once the rain stopped, the sun came back out for a while and we had a brilliant sunset and a rainbow too, to enhance the view over the harbour with the venerable Grand Turk looking wonderful in the golden glow given to it by the low sun.

Towards the end of the trip, during which we had demolished several bottles of wine, we passed the Skinny Bridge. Our last major Amsterdam landmark.

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